


The Nightmare

by emilyshee



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Long Distance Relationships, M/M, phone cuddles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 14:12:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3071102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emilyshee/pseuds/emilyshee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Cecil, what's wrong?"<br/>"Nothing.  It's stupid.  I just - I had a bit of a nightmare."<br/>"What about?"<br/>"You didn't love me anymore."<br/>"Hmm.  Well, that is stupid," Carlos said, "Tell me about it."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nightmare

_"I built a new you."  Carlos flipped back the sheet over the thing on the lab table.  "A better you.  This Cecil knows better than to talk about our relationship on the air.  This Cecil dresses like a normal person, and would never try to bring home a cat.  This Cecil is never petulant or unreasonable.  And best of all, this Cecil will never try to get in the way of my Science.  This Cecil won't complain when I don't come home or try to distract me with his needs and his whining."_

_Cecil stared in mounting horror at the more handsome version of himself whose chest was beginning to rise and fall.  It opened its eyes (like his, but bigger and brighter) and started to sit up.  Cecil choked back sobs and cringed away, knowing that the thing was about to speak and if he had to hear his voice coming from its full, kissable mouth he would never survive the agony._

_"Aren't you happy for me?" asked Carlos._

Cecil woke up twisted in the blankets, sweat cooling on his skin.  He lay there gasping for a minute, trembling too hard to move, then he dove for his phone on the nightstand, trying to make his heart stop pounding as he listened to it ring on the other end.

"M'ello," mumbled Carlos, and as soon as Cecil heard his voice, something inside him unstiffened.  What a ridiculous dream!  That was nothing like Carlos.  And how ridiculous he was being for letting it upset him.  What was he doing calling his boyfriend at - he glanced at the clock - three in morning!  Maybe he could play it off like a mistake.

"Hi, is this a good time?" Cecil said, as brightly as he could muster, "It's so hard to tell, what with time not being real and all.  Plus Wednesday was cancelled this week, and you know how that always throws off-"

"Cecil, what's wrong?" Carlos interrupted, a bit more alertly.  Damn.

"Nothing.  It's stupid.  Forget it."

Carlos didn't respond.

"I just had a bit of a bad dream, that's all.  Nothing to worry about.  I shouldn't have bothered you."

"I want you to call me about stuff like this."  Cecil could picture exactly the way Carlos looked right now, as he said that.  Lying in the sand, or maybe in a huge tent borrowed from the masked army, hair all mussed, face still warm and mushy from sleep, the grogginess just starting to leave his dark eyes.  "What was your dream about?"

"You.  You - um - you didn't love me."

"Hmm.  You're right, that is stupid."  Cecil smiled in spite of himself.  "Tell me about it."

"It started with me being home alone.  I heard noises, coming from the basement."

"Cecil, we don't have a basement."

"Yeah, I know, but this was a dream, remember?  In the dream, we had a basement, and you'd converted it into a lab."

"I like that.  We absolutely should have looked for a house with a basement lab."

"You were in the basement, doing something at a huge surgical table in the middle of the room.  I was so thrilled to see you again, in person.  I called your name, but when you looked up, you weren't glad to see me.  You looked irritated, like you were annoyed that I'd interrupted you.  That's when I saw the old oak door behind you, and I knew, the way that you just know things in dreams, that it had been there from the beginning and that you could come and go whenever you pleased.  I was so angry with you, that an old oak door was _in our house_ and you didn't tell me about it.  I was so angry I couldn't even speak.  Then you started to show me what you were working on.  It was - it was a biomachine, like Strex had, like what Daniel was, part person, part machine.  You'd built it.  You must have been working on it for months.  It looked like me, a lot like me, except it was better looking."

"Not possible."

"You shush, this was very upsetting!  It had hair like mine, and a nose like mine, but its features were more even and it had better cheekbones and it didn't have any of that pudge around the middle, like I do."  Cecil was not fat, not by any means, but you wouldn't exactly call him thin either.  "It had really nice abs actually, like yours.  And then you started telling me about how you'd built it to replace me, and how it would never bother you by bringing home cats that make you sneeze or talking about you on the radio or dressing embarrassingly and how it would never, ever try to take you away from your science, and how much happier you'd be with it than with me.  That's when I woke up."

"So this thing in your dream was like you, but not squishy and huggable, or so excited about us that he has to shout about it from the rooftops, and was the kind of person who would abandon his beloved injured office pet rather than temporarily inconvenience his boyfriend, and who would never distract me from my science, but just let me cancel dates and work all the time and not call and basically put no effort into our relationship.  Hmm.  I have to tell you Cecil, that doesn't sound like any fun at all."

"I told you it was stupid," Cecil said, grinning.

"Honestly, what would I do with myself if I couldn't come up with new ways to tease you about your fannypack.  That's my eighth-favorite past-time."

"Only eighth?  I didn't realize I ranked so low."

"Five of the top seven also involve you."

 "When you get home, I want you to tell me the whole list, and we'll see if we can get through all of them in one day."  Cecil smiled as he leaned back on his pillow.  The last bits of anxiety leftover from the dream were draining away, and he was so glad he called Carlos.

"... Cecil?  I know that you think I'm not trying hard enough to come home.  I know it's easier for you to think of me as trapped here rather than staying voluntarily to do science.  But I don't want you to think, even subconsciously, even in a dream, that if you were different, somehow, I'd want to come home more.  It's not that I don't love you enough.  I really, really do."

"I know.  I know," said Cecil, "It took me a while to figure it out.  I do want you to want to come home more.  But I know that it's not loving me more that would make that happen.  You'd have to love science less.

"But I don't want you to love science less!  I _like_ that you love learning and thinking and figuring things out.  I _like_ the way your eyes light up when you see something you don't understand and the way you get so excited to show me your experiments and explain what you're doing, even if I don't understand.  I wouldn't change any of that.  Not for anything.  Not even ... not even if it meant having you home.  I mean, I know that you _can't_ come home right now, but even if it meant you trying harder to find a door, I wouldn't change it."

It was a difficult thing for him to say, but still true.

"Cecil, how many of your science teachers did you have crushes on in school?"

"Oh, all of them," Cecil said quickly, "Even the women.  Which is unusual, for me."

"Whereas I can't remember having any thoughts at all about any radio host before I came to Night Vale.  You must be special."

Cecil squirmed delightedly.  Carlos had hurt him unintentionally so many times with careless words, but there were times, when he really tried, when _no one_ could say just the thing to make him feel better the way Carlos could.

Though now that he did feel so much better, maybe he should let his poor scientist get some sleep.  He was just about to suggest as much when Carlos continued.

"I'll tell you one thing from that dream of yours that I wouldn't mind coming true, though."

"What?" said Cecil, expecting Carlos to say something wistful about the idea of having his own lab in the basement.

"I wouldn't mind having a permanently existing old oak door leading straight to our house that I could travel back and forth with whenever I wanted."

Cecil sighed fervently, "Oh, I would sacrifice numerous major organs to have that."

"I'd definitely give up a kidney for it," said Carlos, which surprised Cecil, as Carlos had finally learned not to make careless statements in Night Vale for fear of bargains being unintentionally struck with unseen entities, and he was so fussy about keeping all of his organs intact.  He must really mean that he would give up a kidney for a way to see Cecil on a regular basis, which was a big deal, coming from him.

 "Do you know what I'd do if I had one of those doors?" Carlos said, a little slyly.

"No," said Cecil, grinning in anticipation, because while Carlos was too shy to initiate phone sex (he was adorably shy) he did love to describe, in detail, nonerotic ways of showing affection, and Cecil could tell from his voice he was building up to that, "Tell me."

"I would give you maybe ten minutes to grab your portable broadcasting equipment, and then I would pull you through the door.  I'd hug you immediately, pulling you so close it would almost hurt, and I'd nuzzle my face into your neck and inhale like I'm trying to breathe you in.  I might not let you go for ten minutes or more.  Then I'd introduce you to Doug and Alicia and any other of the masked soldiers I could find.  'Hi, this is Cecil, my gorgeous radio host boyfriend that I never shut up about.'  I'll be so excited!  Then I'd show you the lighthouse, and the canyon, and all the experiments I've been working on, except it'll be difficult to show you around, because I'll have my arm around your shoulders and I won't be able to drop it, so I'll have to just lead you around like that.  I won't stop touching you until it's time to meet Alicia's dog, because we have to pet the dog."

"Of course."

"I'm so excited for you to meet the dog!  You look so adorable when you're watching those youtube videos about cats, I can't even imagine the look on your face when you see a Bichon Frisé the size of a small car.  I'll have to keep glancing back at you while we're petting it.

"Then maybe it'll be time for your show and I'll get to listen to you do the broadcast.  I used to love listening.  You can tell Night Vale about all the things we've done that day."

"You can help me with it.  Be our Other Desert correspondent."

"I'd like that.  Then, when your show's over, it'll just be getting dark, and I'll show you all the planets and comets and mysterious changing constellations that I told you about.  We'll sit there and watch the sky together, just like we did in the parking lot at Arby's.

"Then it'll be getting late, and you'll be tired.  I promised to come home with you, but then I say that I want just one more night charting the stars, because I think I'm close to spotting a pattern.  You'll be disappointed, but you didn't expect to stay overnight, so you didn't pack anything and you want to go home.  I promise to see you tomorrow, then we kiss goodbye and you go back through the door."

"I do?"

"Yes, you do.  _Because_ , I give you about two hours to get settled and go to sleep alone in our empty bed like you always do, before I sneak through the door as quietly as I can.  I take off my shoes so you can't hear me and I don't turn on any lights.  I creep into our bedroom, and the noise of someone else moving even that quietly would wake you up, but I don't, because even after all this time your ears still recognize what I sound like and don't send any danger signals to your brain.  You're almost entirely asleep, curled up on your side like you do, and I slip into bed behind you.  I curl up my legs flush with yours, and I gently slide one arm under your pillow so it's cradling your head.  I put my other arm around you, sliding my hand under your shirt, over your stomach and up your ribs until it rests on your chest, where I can feel your heartbeat."

Cecil put his phone on speaker and laid it on the pillow next to him so that he he could position his body the way Carlos was describing.  He wished, not for the first time, that he possessed Carlos's vivid sensory imagination.  He had learned over the months that the scientist always lived so much in his head - that brilliant head of his - that as long as Cecil was there with him, there was precious little difference for him between fantasizing about something together and actually experiencing it.  Cecil knew that Carlos would wake the next morning feeling almost as comforted, emotionally and physically, as if he actually had managed to come home just for the night and slip into bed with his boyfriend.  But as much as Cecil enjoyed their little fantasies - and he enjoyed them so much - underneath, he was always all too aware that the hand on his chest was his own and not the one that he wanted and loved.

"You don't wake up at first.  We've slept like this so many times that your body is still used to it, and doesn't register that anything unusual is happening.  But eventually, some semi-conscious part of you realizes that I'm not supposed to be home, and you wake yourself up.  You're not scared, though, because you know my touch so well that somewhere deep in your limbic system you already know that it's me, before your higher-level brain functions have caught up.  You pull away from me just enough that you can turn around and see my face in the dim streetlight coming through the blinds.  And you recognize me.  And-"

"And I hit you with a pillow!" Cecil interrupted, "Imagine, making me go through saying good-bye to you in the desert just so you could surprise me."

Carlos laughed, and was there anything better in the world than making Carlos laugh?  Cecil couldn't think of very much.  He wished that the scientist was home, here, with him, in reality, but this wasn't so bad, really, talking to him on the phone, building scenarios together.

"OK, I deserve it," Carlos said, "But it's a nice surprise, right?"

"It's the best surprise," said Cecil, "What happens next?"

"Well, um, we're in bed, um, obviously, and you realize it's me, and ..." Carlos trailed off, flustered, which meant that it was Cecil's turn to take over.  Carlos wouldn't initiate phone sex, but he would participate enthusiastically as long as Cecil started it and managed to get him worked up enough to overcome his embarrassment at saying things like _that_ out loud.

"Actually, I know what happens next," said Cecil, "You haven't taken off anything but your shoes yet, and you've been in that desert for months.  You, mister, are getting sand all over our sheets!  I take you into the shower.  Maybe I drag you there by your hair, because I'm still a little mad at you for pulling that stunt."

Carlos laughed again, a little, but Cecil could hear a breathy excitement behind it.  _No,_ he thought, before he continued, _this isn't bad **at all.**_


End file.
